“When Man ceases to worship God, he does not worship nothing, but instead worships everything.”–attributed to Chesterton
The failure of authority, and not only religious authority, has left people vulnerable to all manner of woo. One may reasonably reject authority but one must not then replace it with superstition.
We have an odd sort of unfree press in the USA. People can, within broad limits, publish just about anything, but getting a wide audience? There are four major book publishers and a handful of mass media conglomerates, all with right-wing to far right ownership. What gets wide distribution is circumscribed, and much of what is published is vacuous. Even before “AI,” public discourse was full of blither. People are desperate for anything real to hang on to, and if they can’t find anything real, they’ll hang on to anything, even crazy things. The damaged US educational system doesn’t help, either; people need tools that will let them distinguish truth from falsehood, and the educational system doesn’t mostly give them those tools.
Two days ago “Big names in AI and Silicon Valley tech announced yesterday that they’re launching a boarding academy for 16 to 22 year olds.” (Faine Greenwood) And I commented, “This is a kind of modernized version of the English boarding school and those were actually pretty horrible. I mean, it’s fun to read boarding schools stories but think about what it was like to live them out! […] My spouse has an absolutely scathing critique of [the Harry Potter] books. I think I’m going to ask them to tell me again and write it out as a blog post!”
And I did, I interviewed them, and here is the result.
Wrote these exceptionally angry Bluesky posts over the past few days
“Stop saying history will judge them. Judge them now. With judges.”—Joe Sandow, writing at the beginning of the Biden Administration
We forget that the Nuremberg trials were military tribunals; the victors in a war enforcing their will upon the losers. Some of the victors chose to do so by exacting justice but nothing constrained them to do so; the Soviets wanted to have show trials but failed to get the other participants to agree.
At Nuremberg law was created to prosecute the crimes of the Nazis. “Crimes against humanity” was invented to describe heinous acts previously unimagined. These concepts led to the writing, decades later, of the Rome Statute and the creation of the International Criminal Court.
Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
A remarkable and remarkably dense book on the nature of fascism. Griffin, who seems to have read everything about fascist, protofascist, and reactionary movements of the first half of the 20th century provides what is probably the best working definition of fascism: palingenetic ultranationalism; that is, a movement based on the idea of nationalist rebirth of a people. I’m not equipped to judge such a densely researched and reasoned book, literally the densest non-mathematical book I have ever encountered, but Griffin is widely respected, except among Marxist historians.
(I seem to be laying out a foreign policy position. May the ghost of George F Kennan guide me.)
